Zain Khalid & Elizabeth Nunez: A Conversation

Elizabeth Nunez is the author of Not for Everyday Use: A Memoir and nine novels, including Anna In-Between, Even in Paradise, Boundaries, Prospero’s Daughter, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Grace, Discretion, and When Rocks Dance. She is a co-founder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. In Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books), Nunez follows Lila Bonnard, who has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. The victim was a Mayfield professor giving CPR to a white woman on the verge of an opioid overdose. The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police. Unfortunately, she fears that in the current hostile political climate against immigrants of color she may jeopardize her position at the college by speaking out, and her fiancé advises her to remain neutral. Now Lila Knows explores our obligation to act when confronted with the unfair treatment of fellow human beings.

Zain Khalid has written for TV and has been published in The New Yorker, The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Brother Alive (Grove Press) is his first novel. In 1990, three boys unrelated but intertwined by circumstance – Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef – are adopted as infants and share a bedroom atop a mosque in Staten Island, New York. They are inseparable, and conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef is indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers, except for one secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend he calls Brother. Brother persists as a companion into Youssef’s adult life, supporting him but also shaking his grip on the world. The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, has secrets, too, including the cause of his failing health and what happened to the boys’ biological parents. When the Imam returns to Saudi Arabia, the brothers, now adults, will be forced to follow. They find an opulent, almost futuristic world. Should they change who they are to survive or defend their deeply held beliefs?